Official YouTube app arrives in the App Store, complete with YouTube ads

Google has unleashed its own YouTube app for the iPhone today. Google has built the app with the help of YouTube engineers with the aim of giving iPhone and iPod touch users the best mobile experience. You may recall that Apple removed the YouTube app from iOS 6 beta 4 and later confirmed that Apple’s license to include the YouTube app within iOS had ended. Apple claimed that Google was working on its own app and today it has arrived in the App Store.

Watch the world’s videos and keep up with your favorite YouTube channels with the official YouTube app for iOS. Sign in to access your subscriptions, playlists, uploads and more.

Enjoy YouTube’s vast video catalog, including official music videos
Find videos and channels more easily with voice search and query autocomplete
Subscribe to channels and instantly access your subscriptions with the channel guide UI
Read comments, browse related videos, enable subtitles and more - all while watching
Easy video sharing to Google+, E-mail, Facebook and Twitter

The official YouTube app is surprisingly not a universal binary so this it only runs well on an iPhone or iPod touch. Of course you can still install it on your iPad but you would have to run it in 2x mode. The YouTube app is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad.

Google and the YouTube engineers are working on an optimized version of the YouTube app for the iPad which should be available in the coming months. If you give the YouTube app a whirl, let us know how you think it compares to the stock iOS YouTube app.

I have been using the app throughout the day and think that it is a major improvement over the apple designed YouTube app. However the way that it plays video so small in the top part of the screen really erks me because now i always have to do landscape.... but hey gotta take some of the good with some of the bad.

just D/L'ed it... looks great... MUCH better than the stock one... however, I do wish there was a video quality setting... seems like it behaves like the old one, where if you're not on WiFi, it defaults to low quality... which sucks.

These are the sorts of things that made me concerned when I heard Apple wasn't going to have a stock YouTube or Maps app from Google, anymore.

Such stock/native apps get a different level of priority and convenience than those from the app store - such as having AirPlay-without-mirroring as an option. That's convenient when you want to quickly send a YouTube video from the iPad to the tv and then switch to browsing or something, on the iPad, while the video continues on the tv.

Simple concept (although wordy to explain) and yet it gets sacrificed because Apple and Google haven't yet agreed on whose ding-a-ling is bigger.

The new app looks and feels much better, but I don't see a way to select a lower quality video, as one can do on YouTube's mobile site. My internet service is slow, so until this feature is added, I'm sticking with youtube.com in Safari.

Now we just need some help from the JB community to filter ads and enable videos that are blocked on mobile devices. Also a way to force YouTube links to go to this app rather than the native app. I am impressed with the app. I like the share button that can copy to the clipboard and send as a txt.

I HIGHLY doubt YouTube will ever voluntarily allow people to download content at all, let alone content that's not yours. They'd out be opening themselves up to contributory infringement claims that they don't need. They don't need to risk it to get most users.